Sample Hamilton family story: Hamilton once walked into a Spanish brothel to find his mother at the bar, drinking with Ava Gardner. “What in the world are you doing here?” he asked her in astonishment. “I should ask the same of you,” his mother replied.
Don’t Mind if I Do is remarkably mum about the ways in which the young Hamilton’s devastating good looks caught the notice of male directors when he hit Hollywood. (Vincente Minnelli, described by Hamilton as effete, did see in him “the quality of a privileged but sensitive mama’s boy.”) In any case, Hamilton parlayed his mother’s social connections and his own wiles into an inexplicably enduring film career. He now freely acknowledges that there were plenty of rich, aristocratic thrill-seekers eager to finance films, and that he appealed to them. But he was both lucky and smart. He knew that making outrageous demands signaled Hollywood status, and he played that trick to the hilt. “Five hundred a week is nothing,” he told MGM, in one ploy to double his salary. “My mother makes that.” Hamilton’s book also describes his strategic eagerness to be the youngest, most impeccably polite actor in the room and a tame alternative to the James Dean types who dominated Hollywood in the late 1950s. His skills as an escort (and, he says, a Don Juan) were just as carefully honed. Glamorous women liked to be listened to and appreciated, and he had been brought up with those skills. Some women also sought his advice when it came to beauty secrets. This was something about which Hamilton knew a lot.
Caddishness was part of the formula, too. (As a teenager, Hamilton had sex with his stepmother. Put that in the circular more-than-we-need-to-know file.) There is a sleaze factor to some of his stories, like the suggestion that an emissary for the jeweler Harry Winston used high-class prostitutes to create matrimonial guilt and sell guilty husbands gifts for their wives. But the reigning mood of this book, like Hamilton’s approach to turning Dracula (Love at First Bite) and Zorro (Zorro, the Gay Blade) into camp classics, is self-deprecating good humor. And its stories are star-studded and wild, offering hearty proof of its chief claim. Hamilton always wanted more than mere Hollywood glamour. He wanted to learn “how to really milk it to the max.”
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